Explosion
by Ishmael
Summary: "And you explode." CJ's love life has always been fraught with difficulty and the search for perfection. [CJ/Toby]


Disclaimer: If you think I'm Aaron Sorkin, frankly you're delusional. I'm just a 16-year-old British student with no more than a few pounds in my wallet. Everything belongs to Warner Bros, Aaron Sorkin, etc.  
  
Title: Explosion Author: Ishmael Category: West Wing: Romance/Angst Pairing: CJ/Toby Rating: PG-13 (references) Sypnosis: "And you explode." Reviews: at the box at the base of the page. Please and thank you :)  
  
Explosion  
  
You were fifteen when you first had a meaningful relationship with a boy. It lasted less than seven days, but in your mind it will burn forever - for a year, you thought about it almost every day, and then it faded beneath other memories only to come back with a vengeance every time you start a new relationship.  
  
He was eleven months older and two inches shorter. It was a summer camp - a week in France. On the day after you arrived, you sat on a tree with him and told him about you, and your hopes and dreams. That evening, you snuggled up to him on a bench, confident in the knowledge you could be what you wanted, that you would never see these people again. On the second day, he grabbed your hand on the beach and sat there beside you stroking it as you talked. You looked at the people around you, and wondered if they realised that you had just changed irrevocably. You felt wanted in a way which was suddenly essential, and you wanted to shout it to the world.  
  
When you came back from your first trip to Paris, exhausted and elated, he was there to put his arms around you. On the bench, you put your head on his shoulder and told him about the wide avenues, the faultless architecture, the melodious language, the smell of heat and wine and a little smoke, that clung to everything and everyone. You were about to drift off, safe in his warmth, when he whispered "don't fall asleep" and planted his lips on yours on a soft but urgent kiss. Part of you wondered at the softness of his lips, but the need of his tongue was interesting and so new it shocked you down to your spine. You giggled at the feeling, and he whispered "funny?" against your lips. You nodded, and dragged him inside to dance.  
  
Over the next few days, you explored each other's minds and bodies constantly, and when he touched you in the swimming pool on the fifth day you thought you would explode with feeling. That night, you tried to show him your appreciation. You wouldn't sleep with him, though, because deep down inside you knew you would regret it.  
  
On the plane on the way home - separated from him because he was going to New York, not California - every other girl cried. If you had to name a moment, it would probably be then, surrounded by crying girls, that you decided you would be different.  
  
Your friends may have sneered at the photographs, but one that you kept to yourself, stuck inside your diary, showed him how you remembered him. Eyes hot with desire, mouth swollen with kisses.  
  
You phoned each other, but the conversation that had flowed so easily before was stilted during the calls you forced yourself into initiating. When you found out, indirectly, that he had someone else, you stopped calling. You were bitter, because he had found someone else first, and deep down you knew you were more attractive than him.  
  
Your response was not to throw yourself into your studies - to be honest, you didn't need to. Instead, you focused on becoming more popular, on breaking out of your social group into the new world of low slung jeans, short skirts and midriff tops that your father despised. Your feet, so used to trainers and the flattest soles you could find, were forced into platforms and high heels. No longer would you try to fit into everyone else: into their height, into their perceptions of what you should wear as a National Honor Roll student and President of the Debate team.  
  
Claudia became CJ - you wanted to forget your mother's name, forget that she had ever been a part of you. You would not become your mother: you would not die giving birth to a child, you would have a career. You would not be Anne of Green Gables; instead, you'd be Constance Chatterley, you'd be Holly Golightly, you'd be Elizabeth Bennet, you'd be Scarlett O'Hara, you'd be Cher, you'd sing and dance and make love and work and live for yourself, not for men. In that respect you were entirely different from all your friends, who found effeminacy attractive: your idea of attractive was a man, theirs was a boy. You wanted muscles and facial hair and age and darkness and intelligence; they wanted slimness and clean faces and youth and brightness, while intelligence wasn't an issue: you wanted Rhett Butler and James Bond; they wanted the Beatles. Your best friend always told you that you had no taste, but you knew you had plenty of taste, the only taste that lasted. You wanted men, not boys, and you were willing to wait for them.  
  
You weren't scared to turn up at the prom alone, in a dress that screamed sex: long and deep red and strapless and skintight, with a large slit up the side. It didn't matter that you had no date. As soon as you entered, every boy in the room was focused on you, and you knew that this was your power, the power that no-one could take away from you.  
  
It was that power that drove you through Berkeley. There were boys, and then men, but none of them gave you the feeling that first boy had: the feeling of explosion, of complete and utter detachment from reality, of yearning want, of love. However good your physical and mental relationship, somehow they didn't understand you as well as that first boy had. You couldn't be as free. You screamed their names, but something inside stayed quiet.  
  
You hated that boy, hated him because he had made you so unsatisfied, hated him for that glimpse of perfection. You had ruined your life at fifteen. You would never have the picket fence and the 2.5 children a part of you, deeply buried but increasingly vocal, longed for. It tore at you, all the more so because you knew you would never have it. Your standards were too high.  
  
When you met him, he was full of fire. Sitting across from him at a dinner table, you were mesmerized by his passion, his thought, and his beautiful words that climbed around you, entangling you in their blazes of understanding and intelligence. That night, you sat with him on a bench, thousands of miles away from the last one but equally perfect. Not touching, but talking, and talking with him, like the boy so long ago, was as intimate as any physical contact you had had before or since.  
  
Weeks later, when he did touch you, you exploded with a feeling that was, on the very deepest level, heart rendering in its familiarity. And you knew you loved him. He was not the picket fence man, but then neither had been that boy so long ago. You knew, though, that he was enough. He was everything.  
  
It passed in a haze of dusty summer, and when he had to go back to New York in the fall, you begged him not to. You would have gone, but you were studying for your Masters and you couldn't leave your father.  
  
Like the boy before, you kept in touch with phone calls. When you heard, indirectly, that he had someone else, you again stopped calling, and returned back to the darkness and the unsatisfying loneliness of other men's arms. You heard he got married, and divorced, and still you remained where you were. But he was never far from your thoughts: he and that boy and two summers, so far apart but so achingly similar. They spun in your head so that sometimes, you could think of nothing else. You thought of them every day, and somehow, you never lost your memory of his face. He was beautiful to you, beautiful as that boy had been.  
  
When you next saw him, he startled you so much that you fell into the swimming pool in the house you had lived in for years. He told you, with his eyes full of the fire you remembered, of a New Hampshire Governor who would be the last President of the twentieth century. You knew you had no choice but to follow him, follow his passion.  
  
The next eight years left little time for longing. The thoughts that had plagued you before lifted, returning only sometimes in the morning at the gym, as you ran alone, or when he looked at you with a certain kind of inspiration in his eyes, or when you read the full text of one of his speeches. It was in his speeches that he showed most fully what he was, and you noticed every hint of his essence that filled the pages of neatly typed script.  
  
But now, your time is over. The eight years which you will always view as the pinnacle of your career are gone. You are following him again, back to New York to work in the media, with him where you always wanted to be.  
  
And as he touches you now, you feel every neglected, hidden, forgotten part of you ignite.  
  
And you explode. 


End file.
